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[Weaver]

I don't have the option as BTW is the only provider around here, but Andrews and Arnold, my ISP, often recommend that the user should consider having two lines for reliability as well as double speed and the two lines should ideally be associated with different infrastructure, so one line say is BTW and the other TalkTalk Wholesale (whom Andrews and Arnold use a lot).

The thing to remember in a set up like this is that the xDSL layers know absolutely nothing at all about this multi-line trickery, and the only the routers at the ends of the multiple pipes associated with the various phone lines know that there's anything clever going on, the ISP's router sending the packets down multiple lines and the user's router merging the incoming streams of packets together into one flow as if they had come out of a single pipe.

[William Grimsley]

True, but it will be interesting going back to the good old ADSL Max that the business runs on (the exchange is East Allington which is only ADSL Max enabled) and remembering those days when I was on ADSL. LOL.

FWIW East Allington currently only has two PCP Cabinets - one got FTTC last year and one is due to get it in H1 2016.

The rest of the lines looks like they are exchange-only atm.

It will be another of those exchanges where Openreach find it easier to offer fibre via a different exchange rather than upgrade East Allington to their 21CN network.

Yes, the phone number which the place is connected to is Cabinet 1, so hopefully they'll get FTTC soon (just not before we arrive but oh well). LOL.

[Weaver]

By the way, earlier I wrote that
> the modems don't have IP addresses

This is not so straightforward forward. There is one additional address allocated to the WAN-facing interface of my router (the Firebrick FB2500) and you could say (correct me) that this is the address of the WAN-facing or outside interface of the three modems. One address common to the three, that's why initially I said it's the address of the router, not the address of the modems or of any one of them. There's no way on earth afaik to get an IP address of one modem (only).

The three modems are just treated as a single pipe that is indivisible, and what happens in the bit between the two ends, where it is three pipes in fact, to be recombined by remerging the flows, is not seen by the Internet.

You can find out what is going on in the individual pipes by going down a level and asking one of the three PPP subsystems what's been happening, and A & A do this by PPP LCP pinging each line frequently and recording the timings so they get a record of speed performance from one second to the next as well as any possible packet loss where LCP echoes don't come back.